Isadora had never looked more breathtaking. Flawless creamy skin. Huge turquoise eyes with dark lashes that cast shadows on her cheeks. Shimmering hair the color of a raven’s wing, hanging straight to the floor. She wore a dark purple velvet cloak embroidered with every color of the rainbow and studded with jewels. An amulet of platinum and amethyst hung between her full breasts.

  Every man’s dream. Every woman’s nightmare.

  “We meet again,” Isadora said, her words floating across the surface of the lake toward us. “How interesting to see you’ve surrounded yourself with your own kind.”

  “Enough, Isadora,” I said, willing myself to sound more confident than I actually felt. “You’ve been banished. You have no power here.”

  On the other side of the lake, one of the centuries-old maple trees ripped free from the muddy earth and shot across the water heading straight for us.

  “Down!” I screamed and the three of us hit the wooden dock a moment before the massive tree split Luke’s truck in two, then slammed into the lake with a mighty splash.

  Karen was trembling so hard I could feel the slats vibrate beneath me. Luke was partially covering me, another of those deeply human gestures that touched the human part of my heart in a way nothing else ever had.

  “Don’t move,” I whispered to the two of them. “No matter what happens, don’t react to anything she says or does. I can fight her but not if I have to worry about the two of you.”

  “What’s going on?” Karen demanded. “Luke’s a cop. He should be—”

  Luke clamped his hand down across her mouth. “Shut up,” he growled. “We do what Chloe says.”

  “Release me.” The sound of Isadora’s voice made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and salute. “You’ve seen a sample of what I can do from within my banishment. Your magick is too new and raw to contain me permanently. Ultimately I will be victorious. Release me now and I will show compassion.”

  I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh. “Compassion? You mean like trying to kill Luke at the knit shop in December? You mean like the compassion you showed my parents when they were dying or the way you watched Suzanne struggling to keep from drowning in the icy lake? Tell me all about compassion, Isadora, because I really need to know.”

  I guess I went too far because suddenly I was being flung across the length of the dock by an unseen force greater than anything I had ever encountered. Rough splinters of wood tore at my jeans and slashed at my sweater. I skidded past the wreckage of Luke’s truck, then sailed off the edge of the dock and who knows what would have happened next if I hadn’t managed to somehow bend my body like a boomerang and sail right back to where I’d started.

  Both Luke and Karen were staring at me like I had danced on the rings of Saturn.

  But there was no time for taking bows. Isadora’s anger was taking physical form and the three of us watched, frozen in place, as her small, slender body began to grow until she all but blotted out the sky from our sight. The wild winds whipped her velvet robes around her legs. Her ankle-length mane of ebony hair swirled around her magnificent face. Her huge turquoise eyes burned with the need for revenge.

  She zeroed in on Karen, and I stopped breathing. Next to me, Luke tensed like tempered steel.

  Stay calm . . . Don’t let her get to you . . . It’s all an illusion . . . She’s still under banishment . . . She can’t hurt us . . . Just stay calm and we’ll get through this . . .

  Isadora didn’t move but suddenly a blizzard of glitter spilled over us so thick and fast I had to shield my eyes with my hands.

  Karen was shaking so hard she needed to lean against Luke in order to remain standing. Who could blame her? I would have traded places with her in a heartbeat, but as much as I hated to admit it, Isadora was running the show.

  “She killed my son.” Isadora’s words were expelled on an oily breath of smoky flowers. “Did you know that, Mrs. MacKenzie? Our Chloe killed my son Dane. She picked up a sword and she sliced him in half . . . my beloved son.”

  Don’t listen to her, Karen . . . Don’t let her see your reaction . . . Stay still . . . Don’t give her anything to work with.

  “I don’t believe you,” Karen whispered and my heart dropped to my knees. Her emotions were fuel for Isadora’s raging fire.

  “Tell her, Chloe.” Isadora’s voice was supple, seductive, a heartbeat away from irresistible. “Tell her what you and your human did that night.”

  I stayed silent even though I wanted to scream, You had twin sons, Isadora! You lost Gunnar that night too and he was worth a thousand Danes.

  The lake slid into total darkness. Moon, stars, streetlamps, ambient light from houses three blocks away. All of it gone. To be human, even part human, is to have the need to banish the darkness. We’ll do almost anything to bring back the light.

  Some of that primal need for light lived inside me too. The part that came from my human father knew the terror they were feeling. It was bred into our bones.

  The eerie stillness was shattered by Luke’s cell phone, followed almost immediately by Karen’s. The ringtones were the same, the slightly syncopated lullaby that I’d heard earlier.

  “Steffie!” Karen cried out into her cell. “Talk to me, baby!”

  “It’s Daddy, Steffie,” Luke shouted into his phone. “Say something!”

  But their phones kept on playing that choppy lullaby I suddenly knew by heart, joined by the sweetly reedy voice of a child rising up over it.

  “Mommy! Daddy! Help me! Please help me!”

  Karen’s anguish split the night in two. Her howls of despair pierced my heart.

  “This isn’t real,” I said to her and to Luke. “This is an illusion. She’s tapping into your histories and reflecting powerful images that will get the deepest response. Don’t buy into it. That’s not your daughter talking.”

  “Chloe’s right,” Luke said. “Isadora will do anything to get what she wants. That’s not our little girl. Keep telling yourself. No matter how real things seem, that’s not our little girl.”

  A glimmer of light appeared at the western edge of the lake. It hovered about one hundred feet above the treetops, spinning lazily, growing brighter with each revolution until it reached the dock and Isadora’s face was revealed at its center.

  An Isadora I’d never seen before. The turquoise eyes were streaked with blood. Her teeth had lengthened into yellowed fangs. The flawless porcelain skin was pockmarked and sallow, sagging around her neck like a baggy sock around a skinny ankle. The oily mist that had surrounded her earlier spilled from her mouth in noxious clouds that made the bile rise in my throat.

  All things considered, I’d rather face down the giant anaconda she had conjured during our last battle than this hideous alternative version of Isadora. At least a snake had standards.

  “You understand,” this giant Isadora crooned into Karen’s ear. “You’re a mother. You know how it feels to lose your child. Chloe took my Dane away from me. She killed him, Karen. She took my baby’s life.”

  Karen was strong. Her entire body shook with fear but she stood fast and said nothing.

  Isadora exhaled another cloud of putrid oily smoke. Karen swayed but she didn’t fall. My respect for Luke’s ex-wife climbed another notch.

  “Maybe I should show you what happened,” Isadora said in a mock-friendly tone. “Sometimes humans need to see things with their own eyes before they can let themselves believe the truth.”

  “It’s not the truth,” I said quietly. “It’s not the truth. She’s using our memories for her own purpose.”

  Next to me, Luke was coiled and ready to strike. The analogy wasn’t lost on me. I reached for his hand and squeezed it, but I’m not sure it registered. He had disappeared behind the cop mask.

  The sky began to curl back from the center, illuminated around the edges with shimmering streaks of silver and purple. Quick splashes of color burst onto the empty rectangular patch, random blasts of white and red and gray that added up to nothing at all.

  I felt smug. She had nothing. Okay, so maybe she could fight against the banishment and cause explosions and make the winds go squirrelly and send us flying in Luke’s Chevy, but those were all parlor tricks. Anyone with the most basic set of powers could do all that and more.

  I mean, a big fat sky filled with nothing but Jackson Pol lock spatter? Come on. Give me something I can use. Something that would make a good story one rainy night over a box of wine and some Chips Ahoy.

  “Show’s over, Isadora,” I said in my best been-there-seen-that voice. “We’ve had enough of your pathetic little magic tricks.”

  “Not a good idea,” Luke muttered. “You don’t want to piss her off.”

  For the record, I should have listened. But I was too full of myself, too high on my own burgeoning powers, too pleased with Isadora’s obvious limitations to pay attention to a man who had spent his adult life defusing dangerous situations.

  “That’s it,” I said, turning toward Luke and Karen. “She’s depleted her energies. She’ll—”

  Luke grabbed my arm. “Don’t turn around,” he said. “Don’t look.”

  But I did.

  In time to see my parents’ car go into a death spin on a patch of black ice and slam into a tree all those years ago.

  In time to see my beloved surrogate mother, Sorcha, crying for me in the next dimension.

  In time to see Gunnar killed by his mother’s black magick anaconda.

  In time to see Isadora’s death bolt ricochet off the crystal shield I held up high and sail straight toward Dane, slicing him in two.

  In time to see Karen and Luke on their wedding day . . . gazing with wonder at their newborn baby girl . . . staring down, mute with grief, at her tiny open casket—

  Luke made a sound like he’d been gut punched, but it was Karen’s cry of despair that will never leave me.

  “Steffie!” Her voice bounced off the mountains and slammed back into us with the force of a thousand battering rams. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry!”

  “Karen,” I cried, “listen to me. This isn’t real. She’s in a different dimension. These are nothing but home movies. That’s not your daughter. You have to believe me.”

  She didn’t hear a word I said. All she could hear was her daughter’s voice.

  The screen was gone. The images absorbed back into the night. The dock beneath us began to sway, then vibrate. A bolt of lightning sizzled from the sky to the lake, sending steamy mist spiraling upward to where Isadora, glowing pale against the darkness, seemed to reach from horizon to horizon. The shackles of her banishment glittered like captured moonlight.

  Banish again! Banish for all time!

  I raised my hands high and called upon all the knowledge I had gained so far. “Banish forever! Return never!”

  I’d studied everything I could find about banishment spells and applied it to keeping Isadora contained, but there was still one piece missing, and that piece was the key to sending her away forever.

  Karen was looking at me like I’d taken leave of my senses, which struck me as pretty funny considering we’d arrived by flying Jeep and she had witnessed astral movie projection without blinking.

  Isadora was fading fast.

  “Banish! Banish into eternity!”

  With a roar that sent us sprawling backward onto the dock, a giant Isadora swooped down on us in all her restored beauty, her giant turquoise eyes blazing with emotion, burning hotter than the sun. She swept in close enough for us to feel her oily breath against our skin. Her eyes closed for a moment and I prayed this was the last gasp of power at her command for tonight, but then they slowly opened wider, then wider still, and the image of a small child in a transparent box appeared deep within her pupils. The child was curled up on the floor of the box, head resting on her arms, red curls tumbling over her shoulders. She wore the same simple white dress they had buried her in.

  “Wake up, Steffie,” Isadora crooned. “You have company!”

  "+//ISBN 0-9673008-1-9//DTD OEB 1.0.1 Document//EN" "http://openebook.org/dtds/oeb-1.0.1/oebdoc101.dtd">

  15

  CHLOE

  This time it wasn’t an illusion. I’m not sure how I knew, but the second the little girl stood up and looked out at us through that glowing prison, I knew this was Luke’s daughter.

  Not a hologram. Not a reflection. Not a construct of memories gleaned from her parents.

  This was Steffie MacKenzie.

  The look on her face when she saw her parents was a mixture of joy and terror that not even Isadora at the height of her powers would have been able to replicate. She opened her mouth to scream but the sound was swallowed within her prison. She pounded the elastic walls with tiny fists, her face turning red as her hair. Tears, shimmering like freshwater pearls in the glowing light, ran down her face and splashed to the floor.

  Luke seemed to be in some kind of emotional lockdown. I thought I knew him, knew the landscape of his face, but at that moment he was a total stranger to me. He stared at the image that was his daughter and betrayed nothing at all. He had gone someplace where I couldn’t reach him, and I wondered if he would ever return.

  It took a few seconds for the new reality to register on Karen, but when it did, I didn’t have to tell her that this was truly her daughter. She knew it in her bones.

  “Steffie.” The name was a whisper, almost a prayer. Then, “Steffie! Baby, Mommy and Daddy are here! Where are you? Tell us where you are and we’ll come for you!”

  The child locked eyes with her mother and pounded harder on the walls of her prison within a prison.

  “What’s happening?” Karen grabbed my arm. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I only know what I see, same as you.” Somehow Isadora had been able to absorb Steffie’s spirit into her own banishment. I had no explanation and, even worse, no idea what to do about it.

  “It’s a miracle,” Isadora cooed. “The grieving parents have a chance to apologize for their mistakes.”

  Luke took a step forward.

  “Hit a nerve, did I, Detective? Maybe if you’d been paying more attention that day, your daughter would be standing next to you instead of rotting in a—”

  With a howl of rage, he flung himself in Isadora’s general direction, but she closed her turquoise eyes and Steffie disappeared. He bounced off an invisible barrier that was part of the banishment and fell back onto the dock.

  Karen’s cry of anguish hung in the air like a bad dream. She screamed things at Luke, things I wish I hadn’t heard, things I wish I could forget. Horrible, intimate, ugly words meant to destroy. The depth of her pain made me dizzy. The worst part of all was the way Luke let it rain down on him without flinching. As if he agreed with her.

  My world was changing around me, and I knew there was nothing I could do to stop it. If Isadora was looking to hurt me in ways that went beyond giant snakes and flaming death bolts, her aim had been dead-on.

  Karen’s focus shifted from Luke to Isadora, and I watched, mesmerized, as the ex seemed to gather strength. “I don’t know who you are and I don’t care,” she said straight to Isadora. “But I do know you have no right to hold my daughter’s”—she struggled for the right word—“spirit prisoner. Let Steffie go.” She drew in an audible breath. “Take me instead.”

  “Karen!” I couldn’t hold back. “You don’t want to do that.”

  Luke was on his feet and moving toward us when Isadora swooped in again and opened those terrifyingly magnificent eyes of hers to reveal Steffie one more time.

  The child’s eyes slid over me without any sign of recognition, then rested on her mother. Karen started to sob as she pleaded with Isadora to release Steffie. The look in the little girl’s eyes was older than time, a blend of deep compassion, sorrow, and the kind of knowing that takes centuries to achieve.

  Behind me, Luke’s breathing was ragged and harsh, like he was struggling to hold himself together and almost failing. Steffie turned slightly and her dark green eyes, so like her father’s, rested on him. His breath caught on the cusp of a sob, and I thought my heart would break apart.

  He took a step forward, hand outstretched, and Steffie flattened herself against her translucent prison, crystal tears running fast over fists soft and small as a rolled-up sock. There was something almost ritualistic about the way she moved her fists, the splash of tears, the eerie repetition of movements.

  “Tell us where you are, Stef!” Luke bellowed. “Help us find you!”

  She was saying something, yelling something, but her words were trapped inside the container with her. The tears flowed faster and those tiny fists couldn’t keep up with the flow. The tears spilled over them like rapids over rocks.

  Isadora closed her eyes and telescoped backward to a spot over the treetops where she glowed like a shimmering purple cloud. There was nothing else in the world but Isadora. I heard nothing but her voice, saw nothing but the harsh glow of her essence in the night sky.

  “Twenty-four hours.” I heard her words from someplace deep inside me, as if the sound was working its way out through my bones. “The clock starts now.”

  She knew my thoughts before I gave them voice.

  “Humans leave tracks through this world and the others. A guilty conscience is better than one of their tracking devices. His child wasn’t difficult to find.” Her laugh made me shiver. “Even easier to control.” She paused while her words sank in. “We can end this now, Chloe. Undo this patchwork of spells you’ve put on me. Release me from my banishment and the child’s spirit is free. Refuse me and an eternity of despair is all she’ll know.”

  The sky ripped apart. The cage around Steffie shattered and I screamed as she started falling falling falling through staggering darkness, her small, defenseless body smashing against the jagged rocks at random. She had nothing to hold on to, no solid ground beneath her feet, only the darkness and the pain. We saw her body break against the rocks, saw her face smashed beyond recognition, heard her terrified cries, felt her terror, her loneliness, her despair as she called out for her parents in an endless plea for help.

 

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